Browsed byCategory: Posts By Ryan

I have been thinking a lot lately about this blog. I got this notification in my email a while ago that said I would have to renew this domain or whatever you might call it in the next 60 days. This only led me to think about how astonishing it is that it has been almost a year since Ava passed away. I can look back over these blog posts that I have written and I can very clearly remember…

Writing has become more and more difficult as time has went on. I don’t think about writing even close to daily anymore. When I choose to write I feel like there are basically two paths I can go down. I can either go down the path of talking about the unpleasantness of Ava not being in my life and everything that has come along with that, or I can choose the path of hope. Hope usually inspires others and it…

When we first started this blog, I thought this would be something that I would write in on a daily basis. This has obviously proven to not be the case. Grief changes with time. Looking back at what I have written and how I have felt I am surprised what has changed and how I have felt. What has remained true through time is how I have felt about Ava and how much she has been such a prominent part…

I made it through a few days of writing the “capture your grief” blog. Then I didn’t feel like it anymore. Today is merely a window in time so it can’t be the way that I will look at things forever. I may even feel differently tomorrow. Who knows. In the last few months I don’t know that I have felt more isolated than today. I remember believing that couples who don’t survive the loss of a child end up…

empathy : the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions : the ability to share someone else’s feelings (taken from www.merriam-webster.com) This one is going to be a hard one for me, because I tend to focus on the things people say or do that aren’t empathetic as opposed to what empathy actually looks like to me. I’m going to try my best to focus on the latter in this post. Empathy from others can…

Empathy is an emotion that I have struggled with in life. Sometimes I can’t always connect to another person’s pain so it can be difficult to know what to do. I didn’t expect to be on the other side of something so traumatic where I am the one struggling and everyone else is left trying to figure out what to do. I won’t really write a lot about this because some of it has already been mentioned before. When everything…

This day is about the “nitty-gritty” of my grief journey. This could be things that I have done in my grieving process that I may think is weird, or things I do to remember Ava, or things I fear about the future that seem strange. All of these things lead to feelings of isolation because you think other people won’t get it. I know early on, I wanted desperately to find out that Ava wasn’t going to be okay had…

Day 4 is about support; how we have felt with the support we received and any experiences we want to share. Not sure how I would incorporate a photo into this one. Leah had some good ideas but I wouldn’t want to steal them from her. Leah and I have talked about support and what are experiences have been in previous posts. I suppose there have been changes in my mindset in certain ways in the last three months. For…

The first time I learned how scary pregnancy can be was in November 2015 when Ryan and I had a miscarriage. I, like most naive adults, assumed that aside from the episodes of nausea and the pain of delivery, pregnancy was almost always a breeze. We waited a couple of months and we started trying again. Fast forward to February 2016. I had started bleeding and assumed I wasn’t pregnant and was having my period, but the flow was much…

As part of the project you can choose to post a photo of a particular moment, but for this one I chose not to. I keep some of my moments with Ava so very close to me that I don’t share them with many people as far as pictures are concerned. The single photo that is possibly my proudest but most difficult is the moment that Ava was grabbing so tightly onto my finger. It is the epitome of a…